MAINTAINING GOVERNMENT STABILITY IN TIMES OF CRISIS:

1. THE INTERDISCIPLINARY VOCATIONOF POLITICAL SCIENCE(S)University of Bucharest,Faculty of Political Science27-29 June 2014 MAINTAINING GOVERNMENT STABILITY IN TIMES OF CRISIS: ROMANIA DURING THE 2008-2012 FINANCIAL CRISIS Veronica ANGHEL (Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest, Romania)

2. Crisis situation • Agents (decision – makers) • Political Strategies • Model of analysis • Case study: Romania during the 2008 – 2012 financial crisis

3. Financial crisis (just another ‘crisis’, same agents) • Finding solutions to ‘fix’ the economy; • Dealing with contestation from the society. While the political elites had to envisage ‘a way out’, they all cared about what all political elites are programmed to care about: maintaining (or acquiring) political power.

4. Agents of change (ACT) = Parties (in power or in the opposition) Common goals unite parties and polarize the political scene. In order to survive, party leaders – acting as decision makers – must benefit from the knowledge of how to accept, shape and nurture political alliances. Without being aware of the priority to build and maintain alliances, parties disappear or build up authoritarian tendencies. What strategies?

5. Model of analysis An outward looking party has more chances to gain/maintain power than an inward looking party. Successful strategy: the party as a ‘free subject’ and a ‘determined object’.

6. Party A, t0 Party A, t1 When in power, the same party has an ‘in situ’ search for identity. Whether it finds new purposes sooner or later, there is a change of context that in the absence of already existing mechanisms in dealing with other parties, leads to confusion. The party continues to be governed by outside rules and causal relations. The party fails when it neglects that it continues to have the quality of a ‘determined object’ and only acts as a ‘free subject’. When in the opposition, a party understands itself as a ‘free subject’. In the opposition, a party is forced to REACT. It is obligated to act as a ‘determined object’, constrained by causal relations to the parties in power and the other parties in the opposition. The success of a party rests in the success of its alliance building strategies.

7. The subject – object problem. Any subject, ‘I’, is placed in a world of universally constraining causal laws. • The party: two main instances of existence – being in power (as part of the government) and being in the opposition. Understanding the process through which there is a shift from one stage to the other requires an understanding of the process of negotiation (bargaining) that goes on between such units of analysis, the parties. • Self-knowledge requires self-identification. Having access to power reshapes the identity of political parties. All members of a party have a collective identity, a common goal. Once access to state resources is granted, there is a period of accommodation with the new position.

8. Romania. Background. • Most governments = coalition • Winners of legislative power, not necessarily winners of executive power. • Alliances win the popular vote. • No alliance survived for a whole mandate. But, no early elections. • Government instability (22 cabinets) • Office seeking elites Having a pluralist system with a majority of office seeking elites leads to more instability than having a system shaped by policy seeking elites.

9. Romanian Government during the financial Crisis. • coincided with a full legislative term between 2008 and 2012. • knew three prime-ministers (Boc, Ungureanu, Ponta) and six cabinets, identified according to the maximalist approach (Laver and Schofield, 1990; Muller and Strom, 2000). • Onset:grand coalition (PSD – PDL); development managed by minority governments (Boc, Ungureanu cabinets); end: grand coalition (PSD – PNL). Although the PDL led cabinets benefited from a more fragile support from the parliament, they had the longest tenure as well as one of the loudest and heaviest falls in the opposition. • What strategies for such changes?

10. In government, (starting with 2009), coalition: the Liberal Democratic Party (PDL), The Democratic Hungarian Union of Romania (UDMR), benefiting from the support of some unaffiliated members in the parliament (who later became the National Union for the Progress of Romania (UNPR) ). • Under the patronage of the Romanian president and with his direct involvement in shaping these alliances immediately after his election in 2009, these parties supported the government with a ‘minimum winning majority’ in Parliament throughout the crisis. • In the opposition, (starting 2011) alliance: the Social-Democratic Party, the National Liberal Party (PNL) and the Conservative Party (PC) formed the Social – Liberal Union (USL). • USL was so successful following the February 2011 official unification that in two years time it brought down the government, won the local elections of June 2012 by a considerable margin, suspended the president (July 2012) and became the only alliance that won over 50% of the seats in Parliament – together with their partners, the USL won for the 2012 – 2016 mandate two thirds of the Parliament, a majority that gave them the (unfulfilled) possibility to even change the Constitution.

11. Instead of the Conclusion, the Strategy. • Alliance building • Politics of alliance mastered by president TraianBasescu kept the most powerful party in Romania (PSD) in the opposition starting 2004 (even though, in both cases following his election of 2004 and 2009, the coalitions of anti-presidential parties would have been able to control more than fifty percent of the parliamentary seats). • The inheritor of the structures of the communist party, the PSD (with its stages of evolution) had to come to terms with having to develop negotiating skills in order to regain power. It slowly accepted smaller partners starting with the Stolojan and Vacaroiu cabinets, until it accepted to be on equal par with PNL in 2011. • Challenging the constitutional limits • Using loopholes in the constitutional, the president can shape his own supporting government. The Constitution does not state what happens when the president and parliament have conflicting views on who should lead the government. These moments of negotiation in 2004 and 2009 are evident of the power that the president has in Romania should he choose to act upon it. • The strategy designed by PSD and PNL to take down the president in 2012, carefully calculated to accommodate legal explanations.